Eleanor King

Eleanor Campbell King (February 8, 1906 – February 27, 1991) was an American modern dancer, choreographer, educator, and Broadway performer. Born in Middletown, Pennsylvania, to George Ilgenfritz and Emma Kate Campbell King, she was the third of six children. Her formal training began at the Clare Tree Major School of the Theatre in 1925 and continued at the Theatre Guild School in 1926, where she studied dance under Doris Humphrey and Charles Weidman, both of whom had emerged from the pioneering Denishawn School in New York City before establishing their own company.

King joined the Humphrey-Weidman company as a principal dancer and made her debut in 1928 in Color Harmony, regarded as the first American abstract ballet. In 1930, she performed in Leonide Massine's Sacre du Printemps at the Metropolitan Opera House. Her Broadway career ran from 1931 to 1934 and included the musicals Revenge with Music and Candide, as well as the plays I, Myself, The Dream of Sganarelle, and The Blue Widow, among other productions. She remained with the Humphrey-Weidman company until 1935, at which point she turned her focus to solo performance and choreography.

In 1937, King co-founded the Theater Dance Company, and the following year she produced Icaro, her first major choreographic work. She received a Bennington School of the Dance fellowship in 1938. Her choreographic output became known for drawing on literary sources ranging from Petrarch to James Joyce, and over the course of her career she created more than 120 dance works. In 1942, she established the Eleanor King Dance Repertory Company in Seattle, Washington, followed by the Eleanor King Dance Studio in 1945. She was named Woman of the Year in Seattle in 1948.

King expanded her artistic practice through sustained study of international performance traditions. In 1955, she studied mime with Étienne Decroux, and in the late 1950s she began exploring Japanese Noh dance, giving her first performance of that work in Tokyo in 1958. She later published The Way of Japanese Dance: an Illustrated Journal in 1982, though it remained unpublished. Her academic career at the University of Arkansas spanned from 1952 to 1971, during which she created the Theatre of the Imagination program. She served as assistant professor from 1952 to 1967, associate professor from 1967 to 1971, and was awarded professor emerita status upon her retirement. After leaving Arkansas, she relocated to Santa Fe, New Mexico, where at age 70 she began studying classical Korean dance.

King received numerous honors across her career. She held Fulbright research grants in 1967, 1976, and 1977, and was recognized by the American Association of Dance Companies in 1975. Additional honors included a Vogelstein Foundation grant in 1976, the Santa Fe Living Treasure designation in 1986, the New Mexico Governor's Award for Excellence in the Arts in 1987, and a National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship in 1988. In 1987 and 1988, revivals of her solo works were staged by Annabelle Gamson in New York. She published a memoir, Transformations: The Humphrey-Weidman Era, through Dance Horizons in 1978, and wrote extensively for dance publications throughout her life.

At the time of her death, King was serving as director of Mino Nicolas' American Dance Repertory Theater and was a member of the Congress on Research in Dance. She died on February 27, 1991, in Englewood, New Jersey, at the age of 85. In 2000, her archived collection — comprising sixty years of manuscript material, correspondence, personal papers, photographs, costumes, and other documents — was recognized by the White House Millennium Council's Save America's Treasures program. The Eleanor King Trust was subsequently founded by her primary protégé, Andrea Mantell-Seidel, to preserve and promote her body of work.